I'll move while I talk.
A quick thank you to the committee for hearing us tonight, for your long day, and for the long days that are coming.
I work with Broadview Press, an independent, Canadian-owned publisher of higher education books. In 2012, the word “education”, of course, was added as a permissible purpose for fair dealing in the Copyright Act. I want to address that tonight.
First, the education sector interprets “fair dealing” to mean that much of the copying that they previously paid for through collective licensing agreements can now be done for free and, in effect, instructors can cobble together and print a textbook for their classes made from several different book chapters or excerpts or stories, while each publisher remains uncompensated. It's a model that involves copying without permission or payment what others have commercially produced.
For Broadview, revenue from these agreements will drop to almost zero this year from roughly $50,000 in 2012. Broadview typically declares a profit most years of between $100,000 and $200,000, so a quarter to a half sometimes is covered by those agreements. We, of course, reinvest this profit in new book projects, in technology, in new hires, indirectly in trying to maintain lower costs of books to students, and very often in the funding of publishing projects that don't always have great commercial success but are widely esteemed for their Canadian cultural value.
The loss of $50,000 in revenue, then, has introduced severe restrictions into these aspects of our publishing program. Indeed, the Federal Court of Canada in the Access Copyright v. York University ruling lists detailed evidence of the damage being done to the Canadian publishing industry in this context.
All of this aside, what about those who endeavour to create a work, like Ms. Bruneau, those who undertake the risk to publish and sell it? Broadview pays royalties to its authors. We respectfully pay permissions to other publishers and authors when we use their work. Writers, illustrators, and publishers should not be subsidizing the education system by being the only ones who pay for that content.